Monday, November 26, 2018

.LATE ADDITION: The Mars "Insight" probe has landed successfully on the Red Planet. For a look at what that means, and plenty of ways to connect, see daily photos from the surface of Mars, videos of many mission and design aspects, and what's ahead for planetary exploration, our pre-landing edition is still here, just below, with a wealth of clickable links.The FOLLOWING is the edition as originally published before the landing.______________________________.

Artists are all about creativity that pushes the known limits and goes to places previously unknown. We wrote that for today. Before we learned of a particular fragment of history:On this date in 1865 “Alice in Wonderland” was published in America. Of that anniversary, Lionel of "Lionel Media" observes, "how apropos that was and is as we slither down daily the rabbit hole: Defined as entering into a situation or beginning a journey that’s complex or chaotic."Talk about multiple applications, down through time. The sorta thing artists love.__________

All the LIVE MUSIC EVENTS this week are in a previous edition titled "Tuneful Alternatives to Mindless Consumerism" at:https://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2018/11/tuneful-alternatives-to-mindless.html__________

THIS EDITIONIS ABOUTTODAY'SLANDING ONMARS

Monday's "Cyber MARS-day" -- the InSight Mars Landing and Beyond

Today, NASA's InSight spacecraft completes its 7-month journey to Mars. It will have cruised 301,223,981 miles (484,773,006 km) reaching a top speed of 6,200 mph.

__________

YOU CAN WATCH THE LANDING LIVE ONLINE

NASA and JPL provide a live feed -- "live," considering it takes several minutes at the speed of light for signals to get here from Mars -- and online coverage runs from 11 am to 12:30 pm(Pacific). Because traffic may overwhelm the NASA site, we have THREE OPTIONS FOR YOU TO WATCH IT:

the landing site and determining where to place each of the instruments.

* The ESA -- European Space Agency -- released THIS PHOTO Sunday as

the latest in its "Space Science Image of the Week" series. This global view

from the ESA "Mars Express" robotic probe includes the region from which

NASA’s "InSight" robotic probe will study the deep interior of the Red Planet.

__________The Mars-California Connection

The role played by Houston decades ago when humans landed on another world is most
often performed now in Pasadena, California, as it directs the perilous landings of robotic
probes.

Only 40% of all probes from all nations that have tried to land on Mars have done it
successfully. Some have missed the Red Planet and sailed into oblivion, some have crashed,
and others simply never phoned home.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which leads this
mission, are preparing for the spacecraft to enter the Martian atmosphere, descend with a
parachute and retrorockets, and touch down around noon PST (3 p.m. EST). "InSight" --
which stands for "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat
Transport" - will be the first mission to study the deep interior of Mars.

Engineers will be huddled with scientists at JPL today, watching with nervous anticipation for signals that InSight successfully touched down.

Before InSight enters the Martian atmosphere, there are a few final preparations to make.
Engineers still need to conduct a last trajectory correction maneuver to steer the spacecraft
toward its entry point over Mars. About two hours before hitting the atmosphere, the entry,
descent and landing (EDL) team might also upload some final tweaks to the algorithm that
guides the spacecraft safely to the surface.

These will be the last commands issued to InSight before it robotically guides itself the
rest of the way. The EDL team worked for months beforehand to pre-program every stage
of InSight's landing, making adjustments based on weather reports from NASA's Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"It's taken more than a decade to bring InSight from a concept to a spacecraft approaching
Mars -- and even longer since I was first inspired to try to undertake this kind of mission,"
said Bruce Banerdt of JPL, InSight's principal investigator. "But even after landing, we'll need
to be patient for the science to begin."

Why We Really Need to Quit Fooling Around & Send Humans

AS IMPORTANT AS THIS IS, it's not a "rover." It's not portable. Everything depends on landing
in a place where the robotic probe can deploy its instruments.

On top of that -- it will take two to three months for InSight's robotic arm to set the mission's instruments on the surface.

By comparison, with the right training in geology and knowledge of each instrument, humanscould do it in fifteen minutes.

During these months required for the robot to set up the instruments, engineers will monitor
the environment and photograph the terrain in front of the lander. Humans could do that every
day and build a huge database useful to compare subtle changes.

Instead, the highly educated and innovative humans involved in this mission must work with
a single, mechanical, and rather arthritic arm, and wait many minutes to see every move it
makes, perhaps thinking of Sting's lyrics for watching the stationary snail's pace of things.

At JPL, the surface operations team will practice setting down the instruments one at a
time using the clunky robotic arm. They'll use a working replica of InSight in an indoor"Mars sandbox," which will be sculpted to match the mission's actual landing site on Mars.
The team will check to make sure the instruments can be deployed safely, even if there are
rocks nearby or InSight lands at an angle.

Once the final position of each instrument is decided, it will take several weeks to carefully
lift each one and calibrate their measurements. Then -- if nothing serious has gone wrong in
all that time -- the science can really get underway.

____________________

____________________

That's all for this edition. We'll be back tomorrow. Stay tuneful!
____________________

<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>

We'll be back again soon with music news and more "News of the Non-Trumpcentric Universe." (c)

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

LEGALESE, CONTACTING US, 'N SUCH...

Boilerplate? Where's the main pressure gauge? And the firebox?

What "boilerplate"? Who came up with that goofy term for the basic essential informational stuff...

<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>
.
♪ The ACOUSTIC AMERICANA MUSIC GUIDE endeavors to bring you NEWS – and views of
interest to artists everywhere – more specifically to musicians and the creative community and
music makers and fans of acoustic and Folk-Americana music. That includes both traditional and innovative forms. From the deepest roots to today’s acoustic renaissance, that’s our beat. We
provide a wealth of resources, including a HUGE catalog of acoustic-friendly venues (now
undergoing a major update), and inside info on FESTIVALS and select performances in Southern California in venues from the monumentally large to the intimately small and cozy. We cover workshops, conferences, and other events for artists and folks in the music industry, and all
kinds o’ things in the world of acoustic and Americana and accessible classical music. From
washtub bass to musical spoons to oboe to viola to banjo to squeezebox, from Djangostyle to
new-fangled-old-time string band music, from sweet Cajun fiddle to bluegrass and pre-bluegrass Appalachian mountain music to all the swamp water roots of the blues and the bright lights of
where the music is headed now.
.
The Acoustic Americana Music Guide. Thanks for sittin' a spell. The cyber porch'll be here anytime
you come back from the road.
.
<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>

About the Picture, and more...

ABOUT THE GUIDE'S EDITOR: Longtime journalist, with awards for print, publishing, broadcasting, more, including the Music Legend Award, presented to just one honoree each year at the Topanga Banjo Fiddle Contest & Folk Festival. Creator and host of radio's award-winning "Tied to the Tracks" that introduced an Acoustic Americana / acoustic renaissance format to Los Angeles radio, with live in-studio performance-interviews with wonderful musicians; over 300 performing guests including GRAMMY and Juno winners and nominees.